Friday, August 20, 2010

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, declares really interesting things.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, claims that the young users of the internet will have, most probably, to change their names in the future because of data explosion and the lack of privacy which, in his opinion, is going to be a real problem. He warns that those users who share a lot of data on the internet, for example, their location in real-time with the help of FourSquare, are at an enormous danger. By regularly following somebody's location, there is a possibility to predict that that somebody is going to be in a certain location, at a certain time.

What's worse, Facebook is the social network which is going to create the biggest problems for the young users of the internet. Eric says that by a simple search, pretending that you're a teenager now, any employer will able to find out anything about you. Practically, all what's there is only user generated content. The employer will see what you've done on Facebook, you're profile data, what you've shared with others, you're comments, and even your photos, so the employer can immediately make an idea of who you are.

And the problem is that this data can be stored even for many years, so even if you've changed a lot and you're a really serious person now, because you had a lot of fun 10 years ago and you seemed like a crazy person, for example, an employer might refuse you.

He even says that CIA doesn't need to work very much to profile you. You already profiled yourself. They just need to browse a little bit, and they'll find what they need. They recently bought web software capable of predicting the future, and this is something which says a lot.

Only the time can prove that what Google's CEO predicts now is true. And if it is, I don't see a bright future for many of us (nowadays teenagers).